One Step Closer to Star Wars Holograms 122
An anonymous reader noted a USC research project that is coming ever closer to bringing the classic Star Wars communication holograms from Tatooine to Earth. There's nifty video and some high resolution pictures of Tie Fighters projected into 3-D. Still no clear way to project it from an astro mech droid, but I'm sure that's coming.
Wow. Just... WOW! (Score:3, Informative)
TFA is amazing. It doesn't go into great detail into how the thing works, but it gives an ok general outline, and the video is cool as hell (glad they imbedded it here).
I can't wait until these replace standard monitors and TV sets. The only drawback is saying goodbye to flat TVs, but that's a small price to pay.
I WANT ONE!!!
Old news... (Score:5, Informative)
The display was shown at the SIGGRAPH 2007 Emerging Technologies exhibition in August 2007 in San Diego, California, where it won the award for "Best Emerging Technology".
Way to keep up, Slashdot.
Actually if I felt like searching I'm sure I could find this same story posted years ago.
Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
Dup! (Score:4, Informative)
Possibly of a dup from a couple of years ago. I would verify can't be bothered searching or getting to the site.
Re:Dup! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah, and we'll have lightsabers too. (Score:1, Informative)
IR lasers focused in a cone by spinning mirrors cause localized ionization of air at a given point. This point emits light. It works. It just isn't practical (what with being blindingly dangerous without IR safety glasses) yet.
Re:Nothing new (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Old news... (Score:5, Informative)
The display was shown at the SIGGRAPH 2007 Emerging Technologies exhibition in August 2007 in San Diego, California, where it won the award for "Best Emerging Technology".
Way to keep up, Slashdot.
Actually if I felt like searching I'm sure I could find this same story posted years ago.
I think this tells us something about the internet as an informational medium. Old news, but how many of us heard of it for the first time today? I know I never saw the 2008 posting, nor would I have frequented whatever site that link is from. Makes you wonder how many things, neat or otherwise, are simply lost to a digital wasteland.
Not NEWs (Score:3, Informative)
I saw this two or three years ago on the Discovery Channel.
Re:Wow. Just... WOW! (Score:3, Informative)
So this is a volumetric style display. It can only display objects within its volume. However full volumetric displays this display has only natural horizontal parallax. It can fake vertical parallax using head tracking. It does have one conceptual advantage over proper volumetric displays, namely that it does not require that you can always see through to the back of he shape, but it should be able to emulate that if desired.
- - - -
Let me attempt to create a classification system for 3D display technology.
Volumetric refers to any technology that is restricted to displaying an image within some fixed size area. It cannot show things like stereoscopic movies. Volumetric displays have natural parallax in both directions, so can be observed correctly by any number of viewers. They can be viewed from any direction, except that equipment may obscure the views from some direction.
Some examples:
A pseudo-volumetric display is one that can only display in a fixed volume, but fails to meet the one of the requirements of a volumetric display, such as having only natural parallax in one direction, not being viewable from all directions, or only being able to display points on the exterior of the volume.
Examples:
Now we have the remaining technology. These pretty much always use one or more flat screens, but that is not a requirement.
A very familiar technology is 2D projection . This is the projection of a 3D image on a 2D surface. This is what we used to mean when we talked about 3D video games, for example. I don't think any examples are needed here.
Now before I go on to talk about additional display types, I should define some terms.
Autosteroscopic indicates that a display gives a stereoscopic image without the need for glasses, goggles, etc. There seems to be no standardized term for the opposite, whIch i will call variosteroscopic
Semi-Immersive means that the view changes depending on the observers position. I mean this beyond parallax. Think of a display acting like a window, so if you stand to the far left or far right you can see different things, while only parallax would give stereoscopy, but you would see the same image from both sides of the display.
Fully-immersive has not just a single window, but surrounds you, or seems to, anyway. VR goggles that track head movement and rotation can supply this kind of display. Volumetric displays that can be walked through also qualify. Later I will discuss how the holodeck fits in.
Now we can get on to our display types.
Variosteroscopic, non-immersive displays. These should be very familiar. They are what mov
Re:Wow. Just... WOW! (Score:2, Informative)